Speaker/Affiliation: Robert Jacobs Ph.D. Profess

or Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences The University of Rochester

When/Location: 4/9/07 12:00 SEA 4.244

Hosts: Mary Hayhoe a

nd Dana Ballard

Title of Talk: ''Near-Optimal Decision-Making in Dyn

amic Environments''

Reception with Refreshments at 11:30 AM

A

bstract: Control of a dynamic system such as an airplane or one''s arm re

quires an actor to choose actions at each moment in time. Do people learn t

o efficiently control systems by choosing near-optimal actions? If so how

might they do this? This talk describes experimental and computational proj

ects addressing these questions. The experimental project examines whether

people learn to control a dynamic system in an optimal manner across differ

ent noise environments. The computational projects hypothesize that people
learn to perform complex motor tasks by linearly combining motor primitive

s and they examine two different ways of acquiring useful primitives. Over

all the work suggests that human action is often near-optimal and that op

timal behavior can be planned in a low-dimensional space.